Five tips on feeding the content marketing beast

Content marketing is a very hungry beast. To drive effective inbound marketing you need to feed that beast frequently. For most businesses creating enough quality, original content can be hard. It takes resource and time to generate, distribute and monitor. This puts many businesses off and underestimating the commitment required will only result in lacklustre results. But it’s not as hard as you may think, you just have to look in the right places.

The most effective way to approach content creation is making sure it’s ‘useful information’, and you have lots of that in your business. It’s simply a case of unlocking it. Here’s five tips to help.

Create your content plan first so you know what sort of messages you want to convey. It doesn’t have to be detailed at this stage, just give you some direction.

Audit your business for existing content. Include everything from every department. Sales and marketing probably won’t be the most fruitful place for finding great stuff. For example, your quality control process would show prospects how careful you are to get things right, or your sourcing guidelines may show how keen you are to work with ethical suppliers.

Find people who are willing to share their knowledge or passion. Harness that willingness. For example, engineers who devour all the latest scientific breakthroughs and could share what they find.

Define a person to collate, manage and edit all of these sources. Give them the time to do it and ensure they talk to staff to uncover interesting things. Also they can make sure nothing business sensitive will be broadcast.

You have huge sources of useful information in your business. You may think it’s very dull but for your prospects and customers it helps them to understand more about their situation. It helps them to build their knowledge of the solution that’s right for them. Most importantly it helps them on their journey of discovery and will ultimately build a relationship between you.